1-18-2010

And lots and lots of cables.

The hem was supposed to be knitted on US 0 needles (2mm), but I didn’t have any circular needles in that size, so I used US 1 (2.25mm). Hopefully it will be OK. If not, I guess I’ll just cut off the hem and redo it. For the neck and sleeves, I have DPNs in the appropriate size, so that should be fine.

It’s knit in the round (to the armholes), so at least I don’t have a lot of purling to do. Not that I really mind purling, since I knit Continental style, but still, it slows things down a bit.

Shauna is not only an all-over cable pattern in a fairly fine yarn, but it also has saddle shoulders, which I’ve never done before, so that will be a new experience. I’ll need to analyze the sleeve pattern a little more – from the schematic, it looks like the sleeves are much larger at the top than I would expect for this size sweater, but maybe that’s just because of the construction. Unfortunately, my LYS no longer has the manufacturer’s sample sweater for me to look at, but I don’t remember the sleeves being large. Everything about the sweater seemed like the perfect fit.

2-3-2010

I made great headway on Shauna during the Las Vegas trip. The body is nearly done.

But she’s got me a little worried. Well, maybe more concerned than worried.

(“I wasn’t nervous. Maybe I was a little bit ‘concerned’ but that’s not the same thing.” Name that movie.)

The finished circumference is supposed to be 34.75″, which is what the manufacturer’s sample measured – the one I tried on that was a perfect fit.

Mine currently measures 30″.

Now, I do expect that it will grow when it’s washed and blocked, but from my swatch, I was only expecting to get maybe 2″ of growth widthwise. I’m sure I can probably stretch that a bit, but 4.75″? That’s asking a lot.

Currently it’s pretty form-fitting rather than body-skimming, which is what I had in mind. But I’m going to go ahead with it. Once I have the body done, I’ll block it and see how it fits before I start on the sleeves. Knitting the next larger size would undoubtedly be too big – probably not too big to wear, just as this probably won’t be too small to wear, but just not quite what I expected.

I knew I should have dashed out of the store wearing that sample! Even then, I figured mine would probably not come out fitting exactly the same. But then, who wants theft on their rap sheet?

Seriously, though, I do think it will probably work out fine, even though it might end up slightly smaller than I expected. It’s very stretchy.

The other concern I have about it is the sleeve width. The size I’m making has a sleeve width of 15.75″. My upper arm measures 11″. That’s nearly 5″ of positive ease for the sleeves. Even for outerwear, I don’t think I’ve made a sleeve width greater than 13.5″ for anything. I checked the math, and their width looks correct for the number of stitches, so I don’t think there’s an error. But the sleeves don’t look overly large on the few finished sweaters I’ve seen, and I don’t remember anything strange about the sleeves on the sample I tried on. I wouldn’t want the sleeves to be stretched over the arms, so maybe having them be a little looser is good. And since my gauge is evidently off, the sleeves won’t be as wide as that anyway (plus, I can just be careful not to block them out widthwise). I’m going to just go on faith that they’ll be right.

Oh, and for the sharp-eyed among you, the center cable pattern does change at the top after the split for the armholes.

2-5-2010

The good news is that I blocked out the body of Shauna, and managed to get it to 33.5″. The yarn (and pattern) say to machine wash, put in the dryer for 15 minutes, then lay flat to finish drying. Instead, I just soaked it in Eucalan (in the washing machine), let it spin dry, and then pinned it out. I figured that would be the best way to maximize the width. Normally I just sort of “reshape” my sweaters and let them dry without any real blocking, but if I have to block this one each time it’s washed, it’s no big deal. Anyway, I feel pretty good about how it’s working out. Since the shoulders and collar aren’t finished yet (have to wait for the sleeves to be done, since they’re saddle-shoulders), I can’t really see for sure how it will fit when it’s completed, but at least it isn’t too tight.

I’m working on the first sleeve of Shauna, and it’s slow going. I had a heck of a time figuring out the instructions/chart for the increases. It’s not that they’re wrong, they’re just hard to interpret. The chart is strange – all it shows are how the increase stitches are incorporated into the pattern – the chart isn’t for the whole sleeve, and doesn’t show where you actually do the increases. There’s also a bit of trickiness in how you set up the initial increases, which I didn’t understand at first. Or even at second. But I think I have it all figured out now.

One thing I didn’t like is that you have to do two increases in a row, side-by-side. The pattern says to use M1, but I didn’t like how it looked to have two M1 stitches in a row – it left sort of an eyelet below them. I futzed with it for a while and tried a couple of different things, and finally decided that a set of paired lifted increases looked the best – so I’m doing a left lifted increase followed by a right lifted increase. So after much knitting and frogging (bad), I finally figured out how to do it (good). So now I’m on my way. The pattern calls for knitting the sleeves on 12″ circular needles, but I only have 16″ ones, so I’m working the sleeve on DPNs until I can get enough increases finished to change to the 16″ needle. I could do magic loop, but it would be kind of tricky with the cables and increases, so I think I’m better off with the sticks.

2-7-2010

Sleeve number one of Shauna finished.

As you can see by the sleeve in profile, the sleeve width increases very rapidly (increasing 2 stitches every other row for the top part of the sleeve). I wondered why the sleeve was designed to be so wide at the top – about 4″ wider than I would normally have made a sleeve for a fitted sweater. But now that it’s done, I can see why. The cables on the sleeve are meant to match the cables of the body at the underarm. In order to make it smaller and still match up the cables, I’d have to lose two cables. Given how large the sleeve is at the top, I could probably have stopped the increases before adding the last two cables, and the sleeve would still be plenty large enough at the top for my arm – but then it might be more difficult to set into the armscye. It’s blocking now, so I’ll set it in (or at least baste it in place) and then decide if I want to try changing it.

It took as much time to knit this one sleeve as to do the whole body. I suppose that was partly because I had to start it on DPNs until it was big enough to switch to a 16″ circular, but mostly it was having to pay close attention to the charted increases. I also spent a lot of time knitting and reknitting to figure out how to do the increases – you have to do two increases in a row, with no stitch between. The pattern says to do M1’s (lifting the bar between the stitches and knitting into the back loop), but doing two of those in a row left a big hole below them. I finally decided to do a left lifted increase followed by a right lifted increase.

I also had a really hard time figuring out the start of the increases, and how that matched up to the chart (the chart only shows the increased stitches, not the rest of the sleeve). Maybe I was just being dense, but it took a long time before it sank in. Part of the problem is that the increases aren’t shown on the chart as increases – just as the stitch the increases are supposed to become (knit, purl, knit-in-the-back-loop, etc.) Then I realized that many of the increases were on rows where I would be increasing stitches at the same time as doing a cable across them. I wasn’t quite sure how to deal with that, so I ended up doing all of the increases one row early. Since that would have been a wrong side row if I’d been knitting flat, there were never any cable crosses.

2-12-2010

And although I would have preferred that the sweater had come out a little bit larger, I still love it. I know it doesn’t really look like it’s too small, and it’s certainly wearable – but it feels just a little small. And having had the experience of wearing one that was 2″ larger, I can definitely tell the difference. It’s the difference between an A- and an A+. But I don’t think I’ll complain about the A-.

Although I’ve done an all-over-cabled sweater before, this one was at a much smaller gauge. It was also a new experience in being my first saddle shoulder.

The pattern is thoughtfully designed to match up the cables at the underarms and neck. Since the sweater and the sleeves are worked in the round, it knits up quicker than you’d think, since there’s not a lot of purling. The fitted look is totally due to the 3″ of negative ease – there’s no waist shaping. I’d been aiming for 1″ negative ease, which would still have looked a little more like this. May have to make that sweater, too.

Modifications: I increased the length of the body and sleeves by one pattern repeat. For the sleeve increases, I did a left lifted increase followed by a right lifted increase, rather than doing two M1’s in a row. Since the increases aren’t actually shown on the chart, I’m not sure whether you were supposed to do them on the row the new stitches appear or the one before – I did them on the row before. Otherwise, I would have been trying to increase stitches and cable them at the same time.